But not really.

Back in 2007, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion argued that Shiny Object Syndrome and the attention crash mean that people were focusing on social networking tools rather than traditional blogs.

Charles Arthur of the Grauniad has pitched in with a piece based on the decline in inbound links to the site’s technology section from blogs. After dramatically – and incorrectly – declaring that “blogging is dying”, he qualifies his statement by saying he’s talking about the “long tail of blogging” – meaning that while big, “serious” blogs are still going strong, the mass of small blogs by ordinary people is shrinking.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it’s still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it’s a “retweet”, echoing the headline.

Of course, it all comes down to what you actually mean by “blogging”. Does it mean producing a website using a blogging CMS or would a more appropriate definition be posting content online in a user-friendly way?

From the latter perspective, no part of blogging is dying. It’s just happening somewhere else. To paraphrase Clay Shirky “behaviour first, technology second”. What matters is what people are doing, not the tools they are using.

Because what’s happening is not down to a change in user behaviour. Vast numbers of people continue to post material online. But booming numners are doing so on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rather than WordPress or Blogger. This does not mean the demise of blogging CMSs either. WordPress especially is evolving into a powerful publishing tool suitable for everything from a n00b blog to a complex commercial site. Crucially, blogging platforms offer plenty of tools to tie in social networking activity.

Thanks to these multiple platforms people are posting and engaging more than they ever have. And here’s an example of some wonderful content posted not on a blog but on YouTube. Enjoy.

In fact many would be better off building their websites on cost-effective open source blogging tools like Wordpress rather than spending tens of thousands of pounds on bespoke solutions. There is nothing particularly radical in this. The sites of both No 10 Downing Street and the Wales Office were built on Wordpress.

Wordpress is easy to use, flexible and comes with an awe-inspiring array of plugins that will keep your site ahead of the curve. The plugins are simple to install and, among many other things, allow you to optimise your site for search engines, link up all your social networking activity and boost traffic. Also, a Wordpress site does not need to look like a blog. It can have a professional design and all the functionality that makes it so powerful.

This site is built on Wordpress (though this is supposed to look like a blog) and we are performing a Wordpress migration for a client at the moment.

But it’s not just about saving money. Clients who go down this route can spend their money on making their messages more interesting to their target audiences – thus making that spend work harder. 

Our bearded Content Marketing Director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, was recently quoted in a Sunday Herald piece about blogging journalists on the importance of content in making a site work:

 ”Attracting an audience is not so easy. You need to make sure the content is frequently updated, that you’re saying something unique and reaching out to [others].”

(Stewart also recently wrote a piece for journalism.co.uk on the plight of Scotland’s papers and the need for them to improve their content and websites.)